Head of Talent (London)

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Anima saves lives every day

Hey! Shun here, I’m the CEO and co-founder of Anima. We’re building an active learning OS for all of healthcare and life sciences towards maximising human wellbeing globally. My entire life, I’ve been pulling on a thread that’s affected all of us in some way. Millions die every year because their medical problems aren’t treated quickly enough. Hundreds of millions suffer pain, worry and discomfort needlessly because of long waiting times. I trained as a doctor and quit out of frustration at seeing countless cases of people dying because they got misdiagnosed or didn’t get the right care plan. In one devastating incident, the healthcare system had simply forgotten to follow up about abnormal test results. Pulling the thread led me to the health spending team at HM Treasury, responsible for deploying 100s billions into the NHS – there, I worked on workforce and system reform policy with No.10 and NHS England (most notably on forming statutory ‘integrated care systems’, which was signed into law as part of the Health and Social Care Act). Seeing the problem space at all abstraction levels convinced me that the only way to fix healthcare was to build a ‘Care Enablement’ platform that can automate and abstract away work at the clinic, and 10x doctors. Doing so would also be the path to a superhuman personalised medicine agent that could go well beyond humans, crunching tens of thousands of low level features at genome and transcriptome level. At Anima, you’ll help us extend the 3 existing product lines we have, that millions of patients use, and build out new ones at the very cutting edge of healthcare reinforcement learning and agentic AI. Your work will save countless lives. Top 1% growth. We grew 450% in 2024, are cash flow positive and at Series B/C metrics with a team of ~20. We've recently cross 10M in ARR. I won’t write too much here, because I think the metrics speak for themselves and if we get further along the process, we can always discuss it more. Users love our product. The biggest testament to this is that most of our growth comes from virality and referrals. As one of the standout companies in YC’s W21 batch, we raised $2.5M before Demo Day in just 4 days, led by Hummingbird. In early 2024, we closed an oversubscribed Series A round of $12M, led by Molten Ventures. We’ve been turning down pre-emptive offers of more capital since 2024. Anima clinics look after 3 million lives, and every day around 20,000 people get care through Anima, growing fast. Why you might love working here Since the beginning, we’ve cultivated a unique hacker culture at Anima with a flat hierarchy. If you look at some of our LinkedIn profiles, you’ll note that the title is often ‘Product at Anima’, which is a more accurate description of what your role will be – it’s much broader than the typical SWE role. We predict that small, killer T-shaped teams will win out over large mediocre ones in the era of agentic AI. We've been purposefully building a 'knights of the round table' where each person has an incredible amount of ownership, autonomy and human impact on saving lives – zero line managers, PMs or EMs, but an intensive focus on coaching and teaching. [In case you’ve seen the show, the best analogy is Firefly and the crew from it. Greatest show ever imo.] It started with me. I self taught and wrote a lot of the Anima 1.0 code, and Anima’s active learning patent. I run most of the hiring tech chats to this day. I first and foremost see myself as an IC and builder, and still build stuff in my spare time. More than 80% of our product team are VPs, ex-technical founders and former CTOs (we do not have titles internally). We also have domain experts, including full-stack clinical engineers: ex-MDs who left established medical careers to join Anima because they recognised the much higher leverage they’d have here. Almost everyone in Anima is at least somewhat technical and very UX focused. This makes for a truly flat hierarchy. Internally, people have described it as a hive mind – there is little semantic error because we all deeply understand the problem, engineering, grading for potential features, and trade-offs. It's Reflected In How We Operate

• With the outlier product talent density at Anima, there's a heavy focus on coaching and teaching, with no need for line management.

We've been able to make huge strides in the NHS because we all deeply understand the problem, grading tasks based on our engineering expertise, and real life clinical trade-offs. This deep domain knowledge is ultimately how we integrated with the major electronic health records (EMIS and SystmOne) in just 4 months, and grew from $150k to $7m in 20 months and 3 product lines.

• We're relentlessly resourceful. In 14 months, we built an extremely loved enterprise app that users have said 'seems too good to be true'. Anima can take an information complete medical history as good or better than a typical human doctor, and increasingly automates front and back office in a way that would’ve seemed like science fiction a few years ago – for example, Annie (our AI) now deals with a large percentage of documents completely autonomously without a human in the loop.
• Anima is a safe haven for free thinkers and we've been careful to build a culture where everyone feels comfortable being their complete unfiltered self, sharing their honest thoughts, feelings without ever needing to self-censor. Joining Anima means joining a crew with exceptional talent density, and your crewmates will never let you down.
• We hire talented people who think from first principles and have high growth potential – great decision makers who deserve to have complete autonomy and are forces of nature when empowered with it. Decisions are never made in isolation by the founders. All information is transparently available to the whole team on our Notion – every meeting, decision, success, failure. We have a live Retool dashboard which shows live MRR, linked to Stripe invoices.
• We are deeply collaborative, and through mutual and self-challenge, we converge towards the optimum, and decisively execute. We are united by child-like intellectual curiosity and experiment and wander freely when the right path isn’t clear. We believe all future managers should be formidable individual contributors & domain experts.
• We hire candidates from all over the world. We offer flexibility over work schedule and location.
• We have a good time! We get the whole team together at least twice a year for team retreats, with the last ones in Brittany (France), La Paz (Mexico), Tuscany (Italy), Dominican Republic!

Role Overview Anima is hiring an exceptional Head of Talent to help us scale our team with world-class talent and ensure day-to-day operational excellence. This is a high-trust, high-ownership role for someone who thrives in chaos, is extremely organised, and is a strong relationship builder. This is not a traditional HR or recruitment role. We want someone who is operationally ruthless, emotionally intelligent, and systems-minded — someone who deeply cares about both the craft of hiring and the crew we’re building at Anima. What We’re Looking For

• Operator First, Always
• Extremely organised and reliable, with a bias toward action and ownership.
• Capable of managing candidate pipelines across multiple functions with speed and accuracy.
• Thrives in ambiguity and complexity — you love when there are too many things going on and somehow make it look effortless.
• High EQ & Exceptional Communication
• Personable, warm, and can sell our mission with authenticity.
• Comfortable representing Anima to agency partners and candidates alike.
• Clear written and verbal communicator who can explain why decisions were made, what we learned, and what we’ll do differently next time.
• Data-Minded & Feedback-Hungry
• Owns weekly tracking of talent funnel metrics: time-to-hire, pass-through rates, sourcing ROI, and more.
• Draws insights from data to iterate quickly on what’s working (and what isn’t).
• Comfortable receiving feedback directly, and sees it as a fast path to personal and team growth.
• Deep Craftsmanship in Talent
• Has managed end-to-end talent or ops processes before (ideally across both hiring and employee experience).
• Understands what a great candidate experience looks like — from cold outreach, expectation management, candidate feedback, and beyond.
• Capable of proactively unblocking/calibrating our agency partners, improving processes, and capturing repeatable workflows.

Bonus Points

• Passion for automating the boring stuff — e.g. Zapier, Retool, Notion automations, ATS hygiene.
• Experience with employer brand building — from improving our careers page to amplifying team stories on LinkedIn or coordinating with agency partners.
• Strong writing skills — your docs, emails, and follow-ups are crisp, thoughtful, and leave no ambiguity.

Experience & Attributes

• 5-10 years of experience in Talent Operations at a fast-moving startup.
• Direct experience managing end-to-end candidate journeys — from outreach and scheduling to feedback, offer stages, and references.
• Proven ability to implement or improve scalable hiring systems (e.g. ATS hygiene]]>